Photos by Cirrus Wood
At 9:30 a.m. this morning, students from Berkeley High School in downtown Berkeley staged a walk-out in protest of Trump’s presidential victory last night. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the number of students involved is as high as 1,500, or one-half of the student body. The vocal yet peaceful group of students marched from the high school down to Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, with the Berkeley police directing traffic at intersections as they passed through. Helicopters beat overhead while the students marched.
The students’ protest signs are heartbreaking, and presage the political future that these young people are entering into; namely, a world in which a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed president-elect can ride to electoral college victory despit a track record of openly insulting women, Muslims, Jews, veterans, journalists, people with disabilities, and babies — babies for god’s sake!
The students were joined by university students at Sproul Plaza — the same gathering place as the student uprisings of the 1960s, and where Mario Savio gave his own protest speech in 1964.
I was angry with them. I was angry for them. No one believed that the election had been stolen, but they felt that they’d been robbed of something just the same.
